Fickle Sticklebacks

Perspective

A little fish in Alaska is astonishing
evolutionary researchers by its ability to
adapt quickly after the state’s great earthquake
of 1964. This designed adaptability
supports creation theories about God’s design
for animals to fill changing environments.

For decades, evolutionary biologists
have touted members of this fish family,
called sticklebacks, as an example of
evolution in action, though they believed
stickleback evolution required thousands
of years of random change. Most stickleback
species live in the ocean, but they are
highly successful at populating waterways
across the globe, and freshwater species
are found in the lakes and rivers of North
America, Europe, and Asia.

Sticklebacks have unusual spine-like
spikes and armored plates instead of scales.
The freshwater sticklebacks in rivers and
lakes have few armor plates and seem to
have descended from heavily plated ocean
varieties. Evolutionary biologists believe
they adapted from their saltwater ancestors
gradually over thousands of years, after the
glaciers receded and left behind bodies of
freshwater on the northern continents.

Creationists have argued, in contrast, that
the original created kinds, or baramins, of
fish diversified rapidly after the Flood into
lots of species, by the Creator’s design. Most
of that change took place in just a few centuries
after the Flood, according to information
already built into the fishes’ genes.

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A surprising report published in December
2015, however, supports the creationist
idea that diversification can take place rapidly—even within a few years. In this study,
biologists observed sticklebacks that were
trapped in Alaskan ponds cut off from the
ocean by the massive earthquake in 1964.
When the salt filtered out of the ponds,
the sticklebacks diversified into freshwater
species within a few generations. The study
also verified that no freshwater sticklebacks
lived in the ponds during the earthquake,
so the freshwater species must have
descended from saltwater species trapped
there during the earthquake.

The researchers were astonished by how
rapidly change took place in these fish.
Evolution can’t explain this by random
changes and deaths over thousands of generations.
They were also surprised that the
new species looked very similar to freshwater
species found in much older lakes
created by retreating glaciers.

Such discoveries suggest that all the
freshwater stickleback species were designed
to diversify within just a few years
if fish were trapped in freshwater. The
humble stickleback shows God’s design for
animals to adapt to specific new environments
rapidly, not over millions of years of
wasteful, random change and death.